Blah... read the rest of the thread and someone else posted nearly the same thing. Oh well. Basically supply & demand + excitement over new stuff. IMO it will eventually balance out. Assuming nothing else is going on.
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baylen76Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited September 2014
a) The future is uncertain.
b) AD/zen always rises prior to a new module.
c) AD/zen also does smaller spikes, either in value or backlog, when Cryptic announces attractive Zen-market offers
d) There are some quantitative unknowns.
That said, I feel as if people are barking at a tree long felled: Resonatorgate was a severe issue, but once fixed, a steady - visible - downtrend was established. The recent sell-off of Zen was psychologically-driven as people liquidated Zen @500 not knowing how much hoarded Zen there would be - it was indeed a small crash. What we see now is a rebound, and soon, it'll most likely test one of the trends (red lines) drawn into the picture below (screenshot of nwzen.biz (informational site I just use) with days set to 60).
AD sinks are working, else we'd never have gotten that visible downtrend in the first place: AH fee is more substancial than some would believe, greater marks of potency are a major drain and will continue to drain AD for several weeks (a lot of people have a backlog of enchantments in need of upgrading).
Bottom line: It may take around 3 weeks for the downtrend to kick in again, plus if there's more Mod5 foreshadowing by then it may take even longer, but looking at recent data I have no reason to believe that we're not headed towards a healthy AD/Zen ratio - below 500. Things on this front, for once, appear to be fine. There are some unknowns (impact of Cryptic's recent measures to prevent illegal Zen purchases (which contributed to supply) for example), but the graph will include *any* meaningful factors at work, so as time goes by, we'll all be wiser.
The idea of a forced cap for an exchange rate is not a bad idea by itself, it has good intentions, etc etc etc.
That said, it can only work as a part of market control/balance/etc. As long as the value of zen is over the cap and there are other ways to exchange zen (without 3rd party gold sellers) there is not much incentive to sell zen “at a loss”.
I've seen even RMT markets tank before due to loss of value of the currency for lack of “gold sinks”. The captain knox was a good start, as is the AD vendor itself. Yet when looking at 1+ million auctions waiting to trade AD for zen, it kinda suggests that something might possibly be unbalanced in the market. Leave the cap if ya'd like, but there better be something in its place to address the issue.
Quick question on the exchange btw since I've never used it. If I'm reading it correctly the 1+ Mil is the amount of zen being asked for at 500Ad each which means there is well over 500Million AD sitting on the exchange? If that is the case, the 75Mil AD that was removed because of the knox hireling would have a very small effect if any at all.
There was a huge drop from 2.3Mil to 0 (last weekend I think) in a 24 (or less) hour period. Personally I think that was due to something being borked...
I believe 500 per zen as too low... cap should be raised to maybe 1000. While inflation such as that found in BoI can happen, many items remain out of reach without tremendous real money outlay in zen should you want to purchase something (take perfects for example a PVorp at current AD prices, which are low atm, would be $130... F That). This in turn leads to 3rd party vendors, which even the big dogs like blizzard haven't been able to stomp out. Seems to me like the better business move would be to raise the zen/ad conversion cap and get less money rather than no money (for the large AD transactions) as the large zen conversions are more likely to be avoided in favor of 3rd party transactions.
There was a huge drop from 2.3Mil to 0 (last weekend I think) in a 24 (or less) hour period. Personally I think that was due to something being borked...
Personally, I think that whoever had any ZEN just sold them for AD thinking "oh well, it looks like it's going down seriously, i'll sell it now @500, and buy it back in a few days @400"... but as that didn't happen, people is buying back their ZEN (thus we have some backlog again).
I still think the outlook is good and once we touch 2-2.5mil, it will shrink again... but of course market conditions can change at any time.
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myles08807Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 409Arc User
edited September 2014
I noticed the faster turnaround time a few days ago and immediately converted several million AD to Zen. I'm sure that a great many like-minded players who had grown weary of the three-week wait felt the same way...and hence, a new backlog. I don't mind waiting the two days it seems to be taking now.
There was a huge drop from 2.3Mil to 0 (last weekend I think) in a 24 (or less) hour period. Personally I think that was due to something being borked...
I believe 500 per zen as too low... cap should be raised to maybe 1000. While inflation such as that found in BoI can happen, many items remain out of reach without tremendous real money outlay in zen should you want to purchase something (take perfects for example a PVorp at current AD prices, which are low atm, would be $130... F That). This in turn leads to 3rd party vendors, which even the big dogs like blizzard haven't been able to stomp out. Seems to me like the better business move would be to raise the zen/ad conversion cap and get less money rather than no money (for the large AD transactions) as the large zen conversions are more likely to be avoided in favor of 3rd party transactions.
Wow why do people not get that whatever the new cap is, 500, 1000, 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, that's what the exchange would instantly peg and grow a new backlog at.
Wow why do people not get that whatever the new cap is, 500, 1000, 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, that's what the exchange would instantly peg and grow a new backlog at.
because at this point they cant control the market as everyone can be a player on it. If the price of zen would go up while the RAD remains at 24k sooner or later one will have to pay alot more per item and zen items will become selling products on AD selling sites. Or something around this line...
Wow why do people not get that whatever the new cap is, 500, 1000, 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, that's what the exchange would instantly peg and grow a new backlog at.
Because it won't. Once the AD Resonator exploit was fixed, even with the backlog at 13.5 million AD the 'real' value of ZEN (calculated from ZEN items in the AH) was about 600-700.
That having been said, I am not in favour of raising the cap at present as it doesn't solve the underlying issues.
I think the AD sinks worked pretty well, but now the ZAX is rising again and testing the trend. I believe they need to look at AD generation IF the current rise continues, because no matter how good the sinks are, they get played out eventually and you're back to a rising ZAX.
I'll say it again: raising the cap WILL NOT solve the problem. Its been proven in other games. You need to solve the underlying issue. Fix notable glitches (we know what happened), make the auction house items viable and attractive.
Look at what happened to the ZAX, we were able to clear 12mil AD in requests because of the recent RP event, recent bug fixes etc.
Raising the cap would never work. You've got a finite resource at a fixed price vs an infinite one, so there needs to be a fixed cap to keep things from spiralling.
Events that drain AD are certainly good, but there might be a need to have more sinks in general to keep things from rising - it's no use it gaining a backlog of millions until an event clears it. This persistent rise currently isn't necessarily just a response to the quick fall off, it's too early to say that.
Those "artificial price controls" keep the price of ZEN from spiraling to ridiculous heights. It's a proven fact that if you raise the limit, the limit eventually becomes the new norm and then people complain that the limit should be raised again. When the sky is the limit, people will charge the sky. Cryptic just lowered the prices of a lot of items on the WB too, and some recent promotions have proven effective, so yea, the sinks are already in place.
Raising the limit is just asking for the rich to get richer at the expense of the F2P crowd.
I am genuinely curious about the "It's a proven fact" part. I can name two current games (GW2 and EVE) that don't have this problem. And yes I understand that EVE is technically a "sub" game but with the exchange it is effectively F2P as it is fairly trivial to get others to buy your game time for you with in game currency.
OTOH, the fact that there are so many AD spammers in this game that offer you a two or three X premium on your money compared to official channels tells me there is a lot of pent up demand for zen. Adding more AD sinks would seem to punish newer players and reward longer term players. Maybe that is what they want to do anyway.
SO 1 ZEN IS WORTH MORE THAN 500 AD. And i mean like.... 4 times more?
I am glad somebody else understands what I thought was a basic concept.
My motto in my feedback is that if the marketing team doesn't consider AD an equal value trade then it is impossible for the ZAX to function.
I mean, if you assume a white companion is free the cost to upgrade from white to purple should, at the very least, be the same value as the cheapest Zen Store purple companion when the value is 500 AD:Zen.
Currently the cost is 1,550,000 to upgrade from white to purple. At 500 AD to Zen that's 3100 Zen. That's 600 more Zen than if you bought a brand new purple companion.
To upgrade to blue is even worse. That comes out to be 800,000 AD to upgrade which is 1600 Zen minimum. The cheapest blues are 800 Zen and the most expensive are 1200. So we are looking at double the costs in some cases.
In order for the ZAX to function AD needs to be valuable. If AD isn't at the very least equivilent to 500 AD:Zen transfers then of course the system won't function.
It used to be the backlog was processed at about 1M AD a day.
My current buy orders seems to be handled at something like 500k AD a day.
So it seems one reason for the queue rebounce is that the Zen supply is low, which could be because people dumped
their Zen into the market when queue got short.
As Zen supply picks up again we might resume the reduction of the queue as the very nice graph a few pages before this showed.
If not Cryptic need to install more AD sinks that will give AD more value so less AD is available for ZAX.
I'd say people are grinding new toons and need substantial amounts of Zen, the Zen supply is dangerously low, and people who were holding back buying Zen due to the backlog just put their orders in.
I wouldn't worry about it unless it rebounds past 3M or so, I guess. We'll see.
So either remove the stupid cap or make the AD cost to upgrade companions and mounts a razoable price. I loved the new archer companion and i really want to upgrade her to purple, but buy 25 dolars in AD just to upgrade a GREEN companion to purple is the same that sign a certificate of brain damage.
Got it?
You are making 2 arguments. The first one is removing the AD cap which I do not approve of.
The second one is your complaint about companion and mount upgrades not being adequately priced which I agree with
Making AD more valuable can be done with sinks and events, it doesn't need the cap changing.
Nobody denies that currently 1 Zen is technically worth a lot more than 500 AD, but changing (or worse, removing) the cap won't fix the problem, it'll just make it worse.
You're looking at the wrong things. Again theonly reason to use the ZAX is if A) you are willing to spend money on the game and you are impatient to have a lot of AD (because if you are patient you can get a better rate of return than the exchange offers). Refining events do not create this situation as you need both marks which cost AD and wards that cost zen to take advantage of them in any appreciabkle volume (reads millions). Artifact weapons and belts,for that small segment of the community that is both impatient and willing to throw sums of money at this game did provide such an incentive. They now have legendaries and so the ZAX will go back up. the only real solve for the imballance is better sontent hence more people who feellike it is a game worth spending money on.
Making AD more valuable can be done with sinks and events, it doesn't need the cap changing.
Nobody denies that currently 1 Zen is technically worth a lot more than 500 AD, but changing (or worse, removing) the cap won't fix the problem, it'll just make it worse.
Actually it's not worth much more than 500 right now. Just look at the ward prices to get the ratio. It's somewhere around 530.
Honestly, it seems to have already peaked and seems to be rapidly falling again. I think we can reign in the panic, speculation, and the desire to radically change things.
I am sure that many people have also noticed that after the backlog fell from around 13.5 million ZEN to 0, it has started rising again.
.... And in fact the backlog DID disappear totally....
Any ideas?
The ZAX dropping to zero was the result of a forced reset, it has absolutely nothing to do with the player side of the economy and the backlog building back up once again was to be expected. It was, in fact, predicted by more than a few posters.
500:1 sets a completely arbitrary $20/million AD value, and given the prices on the AH that's ridiculous. No, it's not at all surprising that there's a growing backlog again as the ZAX is currently fueled (on the Zen side) primarily by whales and there is a finite number of them.
Comments
b) AD/zen always rises prior to a new module.
c) AD/zen also does smaller spikes, either in value or backlog, when Cryptic announces attractive Zen-market offers
d) There are some quantitative unknowns.
That said, I feel as if people are barking at a tree long felled: Resonatorgate was a severe issue, but once fixed, a steady - visible - downtrend was established. The recent sell-off of Zen was psychologically-driven as people liquidated Zen @500 not knowing how much hoarded Zen there would be - it was indeed a small crash. What we see now is a rebound, and soon, it'll most likely test one of the trends (red lines) drawn into the picture below (screenshot of nwzen.biz (informational site I just use) with days set to 60).
AD sinks are working, else we'd never have gotten that visible downtrend in the first place: AH fee is more substancial than some would believe, greater marks of potency are a major drain and will continue to drain AD for several weeks (a lot of people have a backlog of enchantments in need of upgrading).
Bottom line: It may take around 3 weeks for the downtrend to kick in again, plus if there's more Mod5 foreshadowing by then it may take even longer, but looking at recent data I have no reason to believe that we're not headed towards a healthy AD/Zen ratio - below 500. Things on this front, for once, appear to be fine. There are some unknowns (impact of Cryptic's recent measures to prevent illegal Zen purchases (which contributed to supply) for example), but the graph will include *any* meaningful factors at work, so as time goes by, we'll all be wiser.
The backlog is rising because 1 Zen is currently worth more than 500 AD. We lack the data for stronger claims, although baylen76's graph is helpful.
That said, it can only work as a part of market control/balance/etc. As long as the value of zen is over the cap and there are other ways to exchange zen (without 3rd party gold sellers) there is not much incentive to sell zen “at a loss”.
I've seen even RMT markets tank before due to loss of value of the currency for lack of “gold sinks”. The captain knox was a good start, as is the AD vendor itself. Yet when looking at 1+ million auctions waiting to trade AD for zen, it kinda suggests that something might possibly be unbalanced in the market. Leave the cap if ya'd like, but there better be something in its place to address the issue.
Quick question on the exchange btw since I've never used it. If I'm reading it correctly the 1+ Mil is the amount of zen being asked for at 500Ad each which means there is well over 500Million AD sitting on the exchange? If that is the case, the 75Mil AD that was removed because of the knox hireling would have a very small effect if any at all.
-Gil
Thanks a lot for the graph.
And I do agree the recent rebound is nothing really strange.
Enorla, Oh so devoted cleric.
I believe 500 per zen as too low... cap should be raised to maybe 1000. While inflation such as that found in BoI can happen, many items remain out of reach without tremendous real money outlay in zen should you want to purchase something (take perfects for example a PVorp at current AD prices, which are low atm, would be $130... F That). This in turn leads to 3rd party vendors, which even the big dogs like blizzard haven't been able to stomp out. Seems to me like the better business move would be to raise the zen/ad conversion cap and get less money rather than no money (for the large AD transactions) as the large zen conversions are more likely to be avoided in favor of 3rd party transactions.
Personally, I think that whoever had any ZEN just sold them for AD thinking "oh well, it looks like it's going down seriously, i'll sell it now @500, and buy it back in a few days @400"... but as that didn't happen, people is buying back their ZEN (thus we have some backlog again).
I still think the outlook is good and once we touch 2-2.5mil, it will shrink again... but of course market conditions can change at any time.
Wow why do people not get that whatever the new cap is, 500, 1000, 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, that's what the exchange would instantly peg and grow a new backlog at.
because at this point they cant control the market as everyone can be a player on it. If the price of zen would go up while the RAD remains at 24k sooner or later one will have to pay alot more per item and zen items will become selling products on AD selling sites. Or something around this line...
Because it won't. Once the AD Resonator exploit was fixed, even with the backlog at 13.5 million AD the 'real' value of ZEN (calculated from ZEN items in the AH) was about 600-700.
That having been said, I am not in favour of raising the cap at present as it doesn't solve the underlying issues.
Look at what happened to the ZAX, we were able to clear 12mil AD in requests because of the recent RP event, recent bug fixes etc.
That's how you lower the ZAX requests
Events that drain AD are certainly good, but there might be a need to have more sinks in general to keep things from rising - it's no use it gaining a backlog of millions until an event clears it. This persistent rise currently isn't necessarily just a response to the quick fall off, it's too early to say that.
I am genuinely curious about the "It's a proven fact" part. I can name two current games (GW2 and EVE) that don't have this problem. And yes I understand that EVE is technically a "sub" game but with the exchange it is effectively F2P as it is fairly trivial to get others to buy your game time for you with in game currency.
OTOH, the fact that there are so many AD spammers in this game that offer you a two or three X premium on your money compared to official channels tells me there is a lot of pent up demand for zen. Adding more AD sinks would seem to punish newer players and reward longer term players. Maybe that is what they want to do anyway.
I stopped reading after that. You disagreeing with me doesn't make me stupid, but thanks for the contribution.
I am glad somebody else understands what I thought was a basic concept.
My motto in my feedback is that if the marketing team doesn't consider AD an equal value trade then it is impossible for the ZAX to function.
I mean, if you assume a white companion is free the cost to upgrade from white to purple should, at the very least, be the same value as the cheapest Zen Store purple companion when the value is 500 AD:Zen.
Currently the cost is 1,550,000 to upgrade from white to purple. At 500 AD to Zen that's 3100 Zen. That's 600 more Zen than if you bought a brand new purple companion.
To upgrade to blue is even worse. That comes out to be 800,000 AD to upgrade which is 1600 Zen minimum. The cheapest blues are 800 Zen and the most expensive are 1200. So we are looking at double the costs in some cases.
In order for the ZAX to function AD needs to be valuable. If AD isn't at the very least equivilent to 500 AD:Zen transfers then of course the system won't function.
My current buy orders seems to be handled at something like 500k AD a day.
So it seems one reason for the queue rebounce is that the Zen supply is low, which could be because people dumped
their Zen into the market when queue got short.
As Zen supply picks up again we might resume the reduction of the queue as the very nice graph a few pages before this showed.
If not Cryptic need to install more AD sinks that will give AD more value so less AD is available for ZAX.
I wouldn't worry about it unless it rebounds past 3M or so, I guess. We'll see.
You are making 2 arguments. The first one is removing the AD cap which I do not approve of.
The second one is your complaint about companion and mount upgrades not being adequately priced which I agree with
Nobody denies that currently 1 Zen is technically worth a lot more than 500 AD, but changing (or worse, removing) the cap won't fix the problem, it'll just make it worse.
Actually it's not worth much more than 500 right now. Just look at the ward prices to get the ratio. It's somewhere around 530.
Looks like I was right, woohoo
It's going down again!
You were wrong... It never rose to 2 mil. No cookie for you.
But... i want a cookie
The ZAX dropping to zero was the result of a forced reset, it has absolutely nothing to do with the player side of the economy and the backlog building back up once again was to be expected. It was, in fact, predicted by more than a few posters.
500:1 sets a completely arbitrary $20/million AD value, and given the prices on the AH that's ridiculous. No, it's not at all surprising that there's a growing backlog again as the ZAX is currently fueled (on the Zen side) primarily by whales and there is a finite number of them.